by Rachel Caine
They joined up on the other side of a gate, where another deputy led them along rows of silent, darkened cells.
“What’s with all the empty space?” Jazz asked. “Or are you telling me crime’s actually down in California?”
The deputy—his name tag read Manning—gave her an unreadable look. “Most prisoners have already been moved out to another facility,” he said. “Upstate. We’ve only got two active pods right now. Your guy is in the second one.”
They weren’t heading to the cells, though. The deputy turned them to the right, through an open iron-reinforced door, into a visiting room.
Jazz felt a definite creep along her back. The place was deserted. It even smelled deserted. A soft-drink machine glowed and hummed at the far wall, but the lights were at half power, and the kids’ area at the far side of the room with all its grimy, battered plastic toys lay silent and abandoned. The deputy grunted softly and flicked on a switch; fluorescents snapped on overhead, blindingly white.
“Where?” Borden asked. He looked informal. She couldn’t figure it out for a second, then realized that his tie was missing. Were they expecting him to hang himself? Or her to strangle him with it? Granted, the second part of that wasn’t out of the question.…
The deputy gestured widely toward the cubicles. There were six of them, all doors gaping open. All empty. “Whichever,” he said. “Go on in. Press the button when you want out.”
Meaning that once they were inside, the door locked behind them. Jazz forced a smile and headed for cubicle number one. It didn’t feel too bad until Borden crowded in with her, and then it was instantly too small, his heat too vivid against her skin. Their knees bumped as they tried to jostle their cheap plastic chairs for position. He muttered an apology as he elbowed her. She glared back.
They both froze for a second as the lock snapped shut behind them, and their eyes darted into a shared gaze. In his, Jazz read the same undertone of panic and frustration she felt. She deliberately forced herself to relax, nodded at him and folded her hands in her lap.
They sat in silence, waiting. The Plexiglas was scratched and warped, muddy with fingerprints. Some woman had kissed it at some point and left a smudged hooker-red imprint; Jazz itched to clean it. And if I want to clean it, she thought, this place really must be filthy.
“Jazz,” Borden said.
“What?”
He was looking down at his right hand, which was curled into a loose fist on his knee. The top two buttons of his shirt were open, cotton hanging loose and limp around his long throat, and the skin there looked exposed and sleek and vulnerable. “I got angry with you, before. I’m sorry.”
Her lips parted, but nothing came out. She just stared at him.
“You need to quit doing this to yourself,” he said. There was a strange tension in his voice. “Hurting yourself. Jazz, you keep putting yourself in danger, and there’s no reason for it. You throw yourself in the way of every speeding truck hoping to get run over, and sooner or later, you’re going to—”
“You think I’m suicidal?” she asked, astonished. His loose fist tightened.
“I think you blame yourself,” he replied. “For McCarthy either being innocent in prison, or being guilty in prison, and that’s a no-win scenario. I think you don’t see a way it isn’t your fault, and that’s bullshit. You need to quit assigning yourself the blame.”
She felt anger fill her up like boiling water. “Look, Counselor, you don’t know me, and I don’t need your Psych One-oh-one crap about what I do or don’t feel. You don’t know Ben McCarthy, you don’t know anything about—”
“What makes you think I don’t know Ben McCarthy?” he interrupted, and met her eyes. Held them. “What makes you think I don’t know you?”
She had no defense for that. She resorted to pure fury, to reaching out and grabbing a handful of his jacket lapel and pulling him closer, but then the heat from his body washed over her and the smell of that warm, edible cologne, and the gentleness in his eyes…
“Jazz,” he said, and she’d never heard anyone say her name like that, with such infinite tenderness. “If you hurt me again I’m going to have to hurt you back. So please. Don’t punch me, okay?”
She felt herself flush. “I’m not—I wasn’t going to—” She let go of his jacket, but they were still too close together, alarmingly close, and her heart was racing so fast she could barely feel individual beats. “Back off, Counselor.”
“You use that like a shield,” he said. Still low and calm. “My title. You can use my name, you know.”
“Borden—”
“I’ve got another one.”
“Fine, James. Back the hell off.” But it didn’t sound right, even to her ears. It sounded weak and fragile and oddly uncertain. “Don’t do this to me. Not now.”
He was so close his breath was stirring the hair around her face. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, his freshly shaved face pale with exhaustion.
His smile, when it came, looked wounded. “Do what? Worry about you? Care what happens to you?”
“James—” It slipped out before she could stop herself. Counselor and Borden, those were things she flung at him to keep him at bay. James was a name that felt intimate on her lips, and from the sudden flash in his eyes, he knew it. “I don’t need your help.”
“I know,” he said, and it was almost a whisper this time. “You never need anybody’s help.”
It was utterly insane, but she couldn’t stop herself. She moved forward, a bare three-inch lunge, and kissed him. She felt him tense in surprise, then deliberately relax, and those lips she’d been staring at for the past long minutes were warm and baby soft and damp against hers, and the heat she’d been feeling that she thought was anger was turning into something else, a white-hot flare that burned down her spine and melted bone along the way. She started to pull back, but then Borden’s lovely manicured hands slid up her arms and ruffled her hair and cupped the back of her head and, oh, my Lord, his mouth opened and his tongue, his tongue like hot velvet stroking her lips, then sliding inside…
Somewhere on the other side of the Plexiglas came the harsh clang of a metal door slamming open.
Jazz gasped and jumped back, shaking, tingling all over, staring at Borden, who looked just as stunned and ruffled as she felt. His lips were damp, still parted, a little swollen and red. She wanted to touch them. No, she wanted to devour them. Again.
She swallowed hard, looked away and moved as far from him as it was possible to get in the narrow confines of the tiny cubicle. She heard him pulling in deep breaths, and out of her peripheral vision making fussy, nervous movements, smoothing his jacket, his shirt.
I can’t believe I did that.
It already seemed like a strange daydream, and she might have convinced herself it hadn’t happened at all, except that she could still taste him, still smell him on her skin and, oh, that felt so…good.
“Later,” he said quietly.
“In your dreams,” she shot back. Unsteadily.
“Yeah, I’m almost certain that will happen, too.”
On the other side of the barrier, she heard jingling metal. Shuffling shoes. And then saw a shocking orange blaze of a jumpsuit—Jazz thought irrelevantly that Ben McCarthy was wearing the same color, right now—sidle awkwardly into the frame of the window.
The legendary Max Simms had arrived.
Where McCarthy filled out his prison garb in flat planes and intimidating angles, Simms was entirely different. Slender, lost inside the ill-fitting outfit, with giant blue eyes and wispy white hair and a face that looked gentle and sensitive and old before its time. He stood maybe five foot five, at most, and his shoulders were stooped like an arthritic ninety-year-old. It looked like his restraints weighed more than he did.
He fixed those mild blue eyes on Borden, who had risen to his feet, and nodded. Borden returned the gesture and settled back on the very edge of his chair…and then Simms turned his attention to Jazz.
It w
as like having all the air sucked out of the room. Like being in the center of the brightest spotlight in the universe, a beam so bright that she felt one instant away from combusting, so bright that there was no hiding in any corner because there were no shadows left, anywhere.
Simms blinked, mild as milk, and settled into a plastic chair that a deputy thumped down on concrete for him on the other side of the glass. He rested his elbows on the table and flicked on the old-fashioned intercom on his side of the barrier.
Borden reached over to turn on the one on their side of the glass.
“Mr. Simms,” Borden said. “Thank you for seeing us, sir. How are you?”
Simms nodded slightly, still staring at Jazz. She no longer felt that appalling rush of—of what? Focus? Intensity? — but she could feel herself shaking from the aftermath. “It’s good to see you again, James,” he said. He had a pleasant, quiet voice, nothing remarkable. A little deeper than she’d expected. “I see you brought Ms. Callender with you.”
“Had to,” Borden said. “There was a letter—”
“Yes, I know,” Simms said. “May I see it? Just flatten it against the glass, if you don’t mind.”
She fumbled it out of the envelope in her pocket, unfolded it and slapped it against the barrier for him to read. He had fussy little reading glasses that he fished out of his jumpsuit pocket and placed far down on his nose. His pale blue eyes moved in short jerks down the page.
“Ah,” he murmured, and removed the glasses as he sat back. “That’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“The part about me getting killed? Yeah. I think it’s pretty damn fascinating,” she said, and folded the letter back into the envelope. “Thanks for agreeing with me.”
He smiled. It looked like a nice, kindly sort of expression. “I like you,” he said. “Why do you think I had them hire you?”
“I don’t understand how a guy who’s behind bars for killing five people has the right to hire me to do anything,” she said. “And furthermore, you don’t pay me, so far as I know.”
“I set up the Cross Society,” Simms said, eyebrows raised. “Where did you imagine that money might have come from? Investments I made, with my own funds. So in a way, you continue to be paid by me, but you’re quite right in legal terms. I haven’t hired you. I have no assets, no rights, no existence beyond these walls, Jasmine. I rely on the friendship and goodwill of others.”
He sounded like the worst kind of con artist, the religious kind, the one bilking Ma and Pa Kettle out of their farm money while diddling little Ellie May out behind the barn. “You don’t get to call me Jasmine,” she snapped, “and I’ve got no friendship and no goodwill for you, so let’s cut to the chase. It was a long drive out here, I’m tired, and I got myself pretty well beat up today, so if you don’t mind—”
Simms looked up sharply, and the image she’d been forming of him dissolved under the force of that gaze again. What the hell was that? It was like a storm in her head, a white-hot merciless laser boring right through everything she thought, everything she was….
“Do you understand what an eidolon is?” Simms asked, and didn’t wait for her answer, as if he already knew it. “It’s the essence of a thing put into another form. The Greeks thought it a god made flesh, but it doesn’t have to be a god, it can be anything that acts as a god. An avatar of power.”
“Eidolon Corporation,” she said. “You named it that.”
“I did,” he admitted. “I hired incredibly smart people to do research. To put some scientific framework around what I already knew to be true. I set the agenda, I directed the research, and I created a monster. A monster which turned on me, as you might have guessed.”
“Fascinating,” she said. “What does that have to do with me?”
He blinked at her. “You mean nobody’s told you?”
“Told me what?”
Simms’s blue eyes took on a liquid shine, something eerie and strange.
“That you are one of the two people that I believe will bring down the beast. Bring down Eidolon, before it’s too late.”
She cocked her head, shot a look from him to Borden and back. “Too late for what?” She was sure she was going to be sorry she’d asked.
She wasn’t wrong.
“Too late to stop the end of life as we know it,” Simms said, as if that made all the sense in the world.
Crazy. This was crazy talk, and she felt trapped in this tiny airless room with Borden and this crazy man across from them. She ached all over and wanted to go home, crawl into bed and forget all of this. Give back the damn money, call it a day—
“How?” she asked.
“Does it matter?” Simms shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t prove, Jasmine. If it happens, then there are no witnesses to testify. If it doesn’t, well, no one can ever be certain I wasn’t crazy.”
Crazy. Even he had the word in his head—or maybe he’d picked it up out of hers. Maybe he really was some sideshow freak mind reader. “Humor me,” she said.
“Very well.” Simms leaned his elbows on the table on his side of the glass, and the light slid over his pale, thin skin. She could see the cold pulse of blue veins underneath. “I suppose you expect me to say something very movie-of-the-week, the new hot disaster terror in all the tabloids. Ebola, or some such. In fact, it’s much more prosaic than that. War.”
“War won’t destroy life as we know it. It might kill a large number of people, but—”
“Forgive me for my inexact description,” Simms interrupted her, “but I meant the destruction of human civilization. The world, of course, will continue. Damaged, fragile, but certainly not shattered beyond repair. But humans? It will take thousands of years to recover. Or, if there is another catastrophe, never.”
“War,” Jazz repeated flatly. “That’s it? Just war?”
“You forget, Jasmine, we live in a time when killing has become a matter of engineering as much as brute force. We are only a few years from the implementation of machines capable of slaughter on a scale undreamed of fifty years ago, which was a quantum leap forward from the slaughter of fifty years before that. We live in an age of rapid acceleration.” He shrugged again. “I told you, it doesn’t matter. Either it will happen or it won’t, but in any case, it won’t matter to the course of this conversation.”
Borden, next to her, was still and quiet and steady, as if he’d already heard all this. Maybe he had.
“Okay, then,” Jazz said. “Tell me something concrete. Tell me why Lowell Santoro had to take one for your team. That’s what it was, right? The Cross Society decided he was expendable. That’s why Borden had to get me to help.”
“Mr. Santoro’s role is a bit complicated to explain, but I’ll try. In six months, he will be instrumental in the making of a motion picture that changes the course of political campaigns in certain key states. That means that there will be increased funding in those key states to the military suppliers. Those suppliers will develop the weapons that I’m speaking of. And so on.”
Jazz leaned back in her chair, staring at him. “You’re willing to kill a guy over a movie? Why not just kill the movie?”
“I understand the concept of Actors and Leads has been explained to you?”
“For all that I believe in it, yeah.”
“The movie itself cannot be stopped. In every permutation of timeline that I have examined—and I have examined a vast number of them—the movie exists. What changes is the credibility of the movie. The people associated with it. And Santoro is the key to forming that group.” Simms leaned even closer to the glass. His eyes looked almost transparent now, at close range. “Understand me, Jasmine, I would have done it differently if I could have. We researched this for years, growing more and more desperate. Nothing changed. Santoro couldn’t be separated from this project, nor it from him, with anything but lethal force.”
Jazz opened her mouth, but Borden beat her to it. “So you got the opposition to do it for you,” he said. �
��You manipulated them into killing him.”
Simms didn’t reply. He didn’t even look at Borden, whose voice was low and tight with anger. He seemed fascinated by Jazz’s stare.
“I manipulate everyone, my dear counselor,” he said. “It’s all I have, you know. The power of suggestion, and responsibility. So yes, I did manipulate them. If you’d left well enough alone, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but…” Simms smiled, and there wasn’t anything really kindly about it at all. “But I thought you might do something like this. The odds were low, but definitely present. The others didn’t see it, but I did. And that’s a great pity, you know, because now Jasmine will pay the price. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
He leaned back, eyelids lowering to hood his stare.
“You’re saying—” Borden began.
“I’m saying that you’ve ruined years of work,” Simms said, “and I’m not pleased, James, not pleased. There are ways it can be fixed, but they’ll cost me. I’m not at all looking forward to the work.”
Jazz stared at him for a few seconds of silence, then reached up and pressed the red button. Somewhere, a buzzer went off. She stood up, banging her chair into Borden’s knees, bringing him upright with her.
“What are you doing?” he blurted, frowning. Simms merely looked at her, placid and unmoving, on the other side of the glass.
“Getting the hell out of here,” she said. “I’m sorry, but this is bullshit. This guy is talking about seeing the future. Are you getting that, or does he have you so brainwashed you believe everything he says? Because frankly, Counselor, you seemed like a smarter guy than that to me.”
She slapped the red button again, impatiently. The buzzer continued to rattle somewhere outside.
